Lexicographic Treatment of Lexemes with a Cultural and Historical Significance

Abstract

This paper analyses the treatment of specific lexical items which belong to rituals and customs, and in that way they depend on the concept, organization and symbolism of the very act, whose part they represent. This type of lexicon can be understood only within specific spheres whose part it is. These are lexemes that go back to the distant past and form complex concepts that rely on numerous encyclopedic-type facts. Theoretical and methodological postulates of the theory of possible worlds can serve as a very functional approach in the lexicographic presentation of these lexemes. The possible world is an analytical concept present in the domain of modal logic, where statements about the same, similar or different worlds are ascertained, confirmed or refuted by means of indeterminacy, necessity and probability. Lexemes of this type imply encyclopedic knowledge related to past times that are not close and necessarily known to contemporary man. These complex concepts that go back in time from the modern world represent one possible world. It is possible through the semantically possible world, and the reconstruction of the world of the concept sphere. The analysis starts with these lexemes and their lexicographic treatment in Vuk’s Dictionary, the Dictionary of the Lužnica Dialect, the Dictionary of the Timok Dialect, and the single-volume Serbian Dictionary of Matica Srpska. The question arises as to how to place the concept of rituals and customs into the lexicographic paper since the usual descriptive semantic lexicographic definition is insufficient for that type of lexicography. Vuk’s approach opens the possibility of space for the concept of a possible world of rituals and customs in the framework of space, which is enabled by the confirmation in the structure of a full dictionary entry.